A few days ago, David Heinemeier Hansson
announced
that Turbo 8
is dropping TypeScript
. I'm okay with that because I don't even know what Turbo 8 is. However, over the past few years, some frontend programmers have tried to sell me the idea that "TypeScript is useless, just use tests". I think people with such opinions either don't care about code quality or simply don't know what TypeScript is. Here, I will explain why you should use TypeScript.
Actually, if you really care about quality and types on the front end rust+wasm is not a bad idea 🤔
Now that I’ve typed that and read it back, were people using TypeScript for anything other than front-end web dev?
It was used pretty frequently for back end APIs too
That is disturbing. From my perspective, anyway. There are already so many great (and more appropriate) stacks for web backends, why Frankenstein a Frankenstein into it?
Well, usually because you’ve got a team of frontend folks needing to do a backend.
There’s one other advantage, which is that you can have a compile-time shared model between backend and frontend. You also have that advantage with WASM, but not with a traditional backend/frontend technology split…
Compile time is my biggest issue with TypeScript. I’ve used JavaScript for decades with compile time measured in, what, a millisecond or two. Having to wait for TypeScript drives me nuts.
🤷 people like nodejs and people like type hinting and IDE reflection. Typescript helps a lot with that
We use TypeScript for our node.js backends.
We had two that started out vanilla, but it became too painful to maintain.
I wrote some TypeScript modules to process a bunch of documentation in markdown to a ton of output formats via pandoc + latex.
No real reason for it, except that I was able to start with the export module of a node-based thing written in JavaScript and iterate from there until I had a working system in CI/CD.
That’s actually pretty neat!